I had posted a while back on the process of book writing. It was an attempt to educate while scaring you half to death. Writing a book is extremely hard work, especially when you try to do it while holding down a full-time job and maintaining something resembling a life. Enough scare tactics though.

My Apress editor, Jonathan Gennick, great guy, wrote a detailed overview of how to put together your book proposal. The overview is targeted at Apress, but that’s largely a question of formatting. The gist of the article, and the wisdom and excellent information within it, are going to be applicable to any & all publishers. Some of the stuff that really jumped out at me:

You’re writing the proposal not only to sell the book idea, but to sell your writing ability

You have to think about what’s going to be on Amazon describing your book

You actually have to know, list, and argue why your book is better than competing books (and that my friends, is VERY hard to do)

You have to build a table of contents for the proposal (yep, time to put the thinking cap on)

There’s tons more information over there. If you really aren’t scared away from book writing by my post, then I strongly suggest you check out Jonathan’s excellent article. I promise you’ll get useful information out of it.

I have twenty+ years experience in IT. That time was spent in technical support, development and database administration. I work forRed Gate Software as a Product Evangelist. I write articles for publication at SQL Server Central, Simple-Talk, PASS Book Reviews and SQL Server Standard. I have published two books, ”Understanding SQL Server Execution Plans” and “SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled.” I’m one of the founding officers of the Southern New England SQL Server Users Group and its current president. I also work on part-time, short-term, off-site consulting contracts.
In 2009 and 2010 I was awarded as a Microsoft SQL Server MVP.
In the past I’ve been called rough, intimidating and scary. To which I usually reply, “Good.”
You can contact me through grant -at- scarydba dot kom (unobfuscate as necessary).

Comments

Posted by Jason Brimhall on 8 December 2010

That table of contents part is the real hard stuff.

Posted by Tim Mitchell on 9 December 2010

Good info. Someone should write a book about how to get started writing books.